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Book Review: Lady Bits by Kate Jonez


Lady Bits by Kate Jonez

Trepidatio Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1947654815

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Lady Bits is a collection of stories with struggling female protagonists: daughters, mothers, sisters, young women with dreams, cynical and desperate older women. In addition to their other fears and strategems, almost all of them are living in poverty, without a support system. They are the invisible women and girls, inhabiting the shadows in an uncaring world. Jonez’ spare language leaves space for the reader to wander and wonder through the words.  This means that while some stories, like “Francie”,  where a runaway teenage girl is offered a potentially lucrative job, are predictable, the writing is enough to keep the reader going.  Many of the stories have an imaginative creature, such as a hobgoblin, fairy, or demon, at the center, but in an everyday environment that throws the fantastic into sharp relief. “Mountain”, in which a former diner waitress returns from college to discover the owners’ new baby is a nightmare, is a gruesome example of this. Other stories have protagonists who have an unreliable grip on reality. “Fairy Lights,” in which a mother discovers the perils of partying with the fairies, and “A Thousand Stitches”, in which a young seamstress is encouraged by her colorful coworker to escape to the city, use this to advantage.

Jonez is not afraid to venture into the gruesome and squicky, as she does in “Rules for Love”, in which a woman prepares for an unusual Valentine’s Day with a helping of arsenic and body horror, and in “Envy”, in which a wealthy white woman uses her privilege in disturbing, extreme, and deadly ways. “Accidental Doors”, in which a woman who botched her business partner’s murder finds she can step through portals to the past to fix her mistakes, also gets pretty gory. When Jonez’ women decide to do evil, they aren’t worried about getting their hands bloody.

I did start to feel beaten up by the number of stories featuring murderous or uncaring mothers. “A Flicker of Light on Devil’s Night” and “The Moments Between”, in particular, felt very repetitive, and the choice to put one right next to the other was not well thought-out. Followed by the gripping, if incoherent “Poor Me– And Ted”, this is a trio of stories that nearly did me in from exhaustion.

Other stories in this collection included the colorful “All The Day You’ll Have Good Luck,” an entertaining and exasperating story about a girl who is flattered into a dangerous position by a strange young man;  “Effigy”, in which a job interview for a nanny position goes very, very wrong; “By the Book”, in which a murderous babysitter discovers patience; “Like Night and Day”, in which Marla Ann’s new neighbor turns out to be more dangerous than he seems, although not enough to keep her from inviting him in for sweet tea; “Silent Passenger”, in which a truck driver discovers a way to alleviate her pain and grief over her husband’s death; and “No Fear of Dragons”, in which the narrator encounters a girl who is not what she seems.

It’s nice to see a variety of female characters taking on different roles in the story, instead of always being passive or victims, but I also wish some of the characters had been easier to relate to. Although feelings were communicated clearly, many character motivations seemed unclear, and that made it hard to get into the flow of the story. This isn’t a collection you can just power through; it takes time to explore what’s going on in each story, and it’s difficult for me to do that and also feel the intense emotions Jonez is trying to evoke. Lady Bits is an interesting, if imperfect collection, and moving forward, I hope we’ll see more strong stories with varied female characters.

 

 

Contains: Violence, murder, rape, necrophilia, child murder, terrorism, body horror, sexual situations.

 

Editor’s note: Lady Bits was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

Posted on April 14, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Apocalyptic Mannequin by Stephanie M. Wytovich

The Apocalyptic Mannequin: Poetry by Stephanie M. Wytovich

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-947879-13-3

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

It is shocking and deeply disturbing to know that in the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, many people continued to survive, suffered through radiation poisoning, and then died. This living death is the theme of a relentless catalogue of ugliness in The Apocalyptic Mannequin: Poetry by Stephanie M. Wytovich.

Wytovich intends this collection to be a warning about the end of the world, or the end of the world as we know it, through war, violence, disease, and finally death. The images in these poems accomplish this goal by painting a setting littered with bloated dead bodies, twisted metal and ashes. Bodies transform into “meat,” clothing into “gasmask couture,” and survivors into “mannequins” who wander the apocalyptic landscape crawling with plague and vermin, barely able to survive or inevitably wanting to commit suicide.

The poems build a narrative in snapshots from the chaos of the first post-impact days, through the struggle to find relief, and, ultimately, to what will be the new normal. Wytovich deftly uses sensory details to create transitions between groups of poems. The initial poems are extremely dark with scenes of destruction that reduce the imagery to a handful of repetitive words that mirror the setting in a literal way.

The next group of poems represents a middle stage in which the survivors struggle to make sense of a world in which they have lost communication. They feel left alone to make sense of a situation in which they must now protect themselves from other people in need who bang at their doors and windows. The speaker in these poems recognizes that the survivors must start over and “re-make Eve” “with the tree of knowledge growing” in their “wombs.”  However, this is not to say that there is much hope because in the final group of poems, instead of new plants growing, there are  ”blossoms of collagen” with “the forest floor” growing “femurs.” The imagery in this section involves shape and color to describe the poisoning of the environment.

In the final group of poems, the imagery becomes more familiar and symbolic because its origin is memory. The speaker’s heart is hidden in “trunks of abandoned cars” and “empty cafes,” and she feels like a “broken doll.” But the world has changed, and so has she. After experiencing tragedy, hunger,  anger, and abandonment, she has turned into a scarred “scavenger” and a witch who has “woken.” Meanwhile, the new world is, ironically, still full of impending death. That is its toxic message to us in these poems.

 

Contains: body horror

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: The Apocalyptic Mannequin was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in Poetry

Posted on April 14, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-947879-12-6

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

In the Afterword to Choking Back the Devil: Poems, Donna Lynch describes how the reader’s “immersion” in horror poetry can be “an ax right to the torso” and more intense than the horror fiction which she also writes. This poetry proves her right. Lynch has created nightmarish psychological landscapes full of emotional pain and torture and menacing nameless and faceless figures that are humans, monsters, and witches. Her words reveal monstrous truths like the real life horrors that are so bad we might want to believe they could only be fictional.

The central poems in this collection focus on capturing the trauma of torment in terrifying emotional detail. The poet keeps the spotlight on feelings rather than actions. There is despair here and a loss of faith, even in God, as well as symbolic images of mutilated internal organs and “hollowed” victims running in terror. In the most ghastly of these poems, the title poem, a body is invaded by the devil. As if that is not enough, Lynch does not spare the reader from imagining being the random victim of a callous human monster in the aptly named poem “It Just Wasn’t Your Night” and contemplating the chilling fate of each child in “Sacrifice” who is “chosen” to suffer in place of the rest. But, neither does she leave out those who turn their horrific memories into weapons, anger, and even a sisterhood of sorts as is the case in “Legend” and “Honey.”

Other poems move in different directions while maintaining the same emotional content. “If You Love Me” uses terrifying thoughts that a rational person might only think but never seriously enact to show how it feels when a victim of a manipulative love turns what should be doubt in someone else into self-doubt.  A clever little poem, “Wreckage,” uses a mirroring word effect in two stanzas to show alternative perspectives in a relationship, and “My Incomplete Children” makes one think of Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” with Lynch’s poems being the horror version since her poems, as she says, “have teeth.” And, indeed, they do. Highly Recommended

Contains: body horror, posssession, violence.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Editor’s note: Choking Back the Devil: Poems was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection.

Posted on April 9, 2020 by , Reply
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